Calendar
At Creative Coding Utrecht we organise a range of monthly events that cater to different interests, age groups and skill level. We aim to help you develop your connection with all things coding, no matter how foreign the subject might seem to you.
Have no idea what Creative Coding means? Have a background in programming but you wouldn’t know where to start making your own, creative stuff? Or do you simply want to enhance your pre-existing skills and create even more flashy visuals, animations and more?
Filter our events by topic and accessibility level, there is something for everyone. To look up any of our past events, check out the archive.
Workshop From Soil to Servers: Regenerative Futures for Community Computing
In this hands-on workshop, we’ll generate electricity from soil using microbial fuel cells. Together we explore what these living systems can teach us about regenerative approaches to powering computation.
Working with artist Sunjoo Lee and researcher Fieke Jansen from Critical Infrastructure Lab, participants will use mud batteries to power small electronic devices, discovering how energy can emerge from regenerative biological processes rather than extractive systems. This tangible practice reveals principles of distributed, resilient, and symbiotic infrastructure design.
Then we’ll shift from soil to servers as researcher Kars Alfrink from TU Delft will guide us through the “People’s Compute” framework to examine how these principles might fundamentally reshape computing. Rather than focusing on individual applications, we’ll address the deeper infrastructural layer: questioning centralised cloud systems and resource-intensive data centres while envisioning collective alternatives that prioritise people and planet over capital and control.
A graphic facilitator, Lena Trotereau, will capture the process in real-time, creating an evocative visual map of our collective thinking.
No technical experience required.
You will leave with: knowledge on how to make mud batteries, visual documentation of our collective thinking, and new frameworks for imagining technological futures scaled for communities, not monopolies.
Dr. Fieke Jansen is a Postdoc at the UvA and a co-PI of the critical infrastructure lab. Her research interest is to understand how the material impact of expanding infrastructures is shaping the management, distribution, and depletion of natural resources.
Sunjoo Lee is an interdisciplinary artist working across art, technology, and ecology, based in the Netherlands. Her practice reimagines the use of electronics and digital tools beyond human-centred purposes, exploring more-than-human philosophy, emergence, biomimicry, symbiosis, and permacomputing.
Dr. Kars Alfrink is a postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft. His research investigates how to design public artificial intelligence systems so that they remain subject to societal control.
Read about the previous iteration of this workshop on mud batteries and artificial intelligence in this report: https://www.tudelft.nl/2025/io/december/from-mud-to-models-a-workshop-on-regenerative-ai-futures